Ever find yourself on a computer without any editing software? All you want to do is to crop an image, fix the contrast, and resize it?

Well, if you’ve got a reasonably new browser, you’re saved: Enter Picnik, a brand new type of image editing software, bringing the genre well into line with all the other Web 2.0 apps out there.

In short, Picnik is to Photoshop what gmail is to e-mail, YouTube is to videos, Flickr is to pictures, Pandora is to music, and CleVR is to panoramas!

I discovered it a couple of hours ago, and am already deeply in love with it. I expect the Digg crowd and Slashdot will turn their server to mush within the next, oh, 20 minutes or so, but once the storm has died down, go have a play!

So far, the Picnik service is a little bit limited — you only get rotation, cropping, exposure (brightness / contrast and, amazingly, a levels tool), colours (white balance and saturation), sharpening tools, and a couple of auto-fix tools. However, I don’t know about you, but those are my most frequently used tools anywhere. I doubt it’ll replace Photoshop anytime soon, but as far as quick hack-up image editing goes, it’s not at all badl

No doubt the MySpace crowd will love it to bits, and even seasoned photographers might find it saves them in a pinch.